What role do community norms play in the diffusion and persistence of new organizational practices? We explore this question through an examination of the widespread practice of wage arrears, the late and non-payment of wages, in Russia during the 1990s. Existing research on wage arrears most...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer?s arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on panel...

We present a model of wage contract violation that implies a possibility of multiple equilibria in the level of arrears. Positive feedback arises because each employer's arrears affect the costs of late payment faced by other employers operating in the same labor market, resulting in a network...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...

This paper estimates the effects of privatization on worker separations and wages using retrospective data from a national probability sample of Ukrainian households. Detailed worker characteristics are used to control for compositional differences and to assess types of observable 'winners' and...

We analyze a model of wage delay in which strategic complementarity arises because each employer's costs of violating its contracts decrease with the arrears in its labor market. The model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification through fixed...

We estimate the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Applied to longitudinal data on manufacturing firms, our fixed effect and random trend models consistently fail to support workers' fears of job losses from privatization, and they never...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer's arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on panel...

We estimate the wage effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) with universal firm-level and linked employer-employee panel data containing 4,926 foreign acquisitions in Hungary. Matching on pre-acquisition data and controlling for fixed effects for firms and detailed worker groups, we find...

We analyze the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Contrary to workers' fears, our fixed effect and random trend estimates imply little effect of domestic privatization, except for a slight negative effect in Russia, and they provide some...